


two shadows creeping

by Dr_Madwoman



Category: Carmilla - J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Nadja - Fandom
Genre: Blood, Child Abuse, Dracula is a terrible father, F/F, JUST, Mind Control, Nadja is happy and loved for all of two seconds, Nadja never learned that you can't solve your problems by kidnapping people, Predator-Prey Relationships, Psychic Bond, Psychic Faxing, all over and in various capacities, and Nadja is well rid of him, rural peasant girls as food staple, vampiric shenanigans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-20
Updated: 2017-01-20
Packaged: 2018-09-18 18:22:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9397403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dr_Madwoman/pseuds/Dr_Madwoman
Summary: My two favorite vampires, together.





	

Nadja had been born from dead things, lifted from the ruined cavity of her mother’s body by her father’s immortal hands, not wailing as a newborn would but watching instead, too stunned by her rude extraction into existence to do much else.

She had been born, not made, but she had had little choice in becoming what she was.

Mircalla could never understand that, not really.

They had met at the feet of the Carpathians when Nadja was still quite young, only newly permitted to hunt without Father’s supervision, and Mircalla’s generous, affectionate nature had won Nadja completely. Mircalla was older by half a century, a bitter and beautiful woman grown rosy on the blood of peasant girls; she had offered Nadja her protection, for a young strigoli alone was vulnerable, no matter who her father was.

Nadja had said yes, of course. Centuries later, Nadja would think of how foolish that younger self had been and hate her a little.

But in the moment of the yes, Nadja had first known something like happiness. Love that was not shackled to fear or resentment was foreign to her, and Mircalla had been very giving of her love.

They wandered through forest and over mountain together, twin slices of moonlight, two shadows creeping. Nadja learned much from Mircalla in their travels, things Father had not thought useful and Edgar had been too foolish to teach. Prudence, to balance the countess’ recklessness. How kindness could win a peasant girl’s trust more surely than cruelty, and sweetened her blood. Hungers that had nothing to do with blood but everything to do with the smooth stretch of Mircalla’s skin under Nadja’s hands and the sound of her laughter.

The pleasure of simply being held, and valued for herself.

Of course Nadja had loved her.

They had eighty years of laughter and feasting, of dancing over shattered flagstones and speaking quietly together in bed. Mircalla’s mind was the first to touch Nadja’s psyche without pain, leaving nothing but a sense that the world, perhaps, could be enjoyed in the right company.

Eighty years of companionship, however, could wear the strongest bond thin. Nadja began to grow irritated with Mircalla’s avoidance of introspection, and Mircalla began to accuse Nadja of sulking endlessly. They snapped and snarled like she-wolves, needling one another over tiny, stupid things. Nadja began to wonder, gradually, if Mircalla resented her for being born into this existence, knowing nothing else and mourning no human remnant in herself. Certainly Mircalla hated the strigoli who had made her, and lamented the loss of her humanity.

Once, when fighting, Mircalla had demanded to know why Nadja had not chosen to be something other than what she was, as though being born from a mortal woman should have given her or Edgar any choice in what they could grow to be. Father had taken that path from them long ago.

They had almost killed each other that night, and Nadja had made her slow way out of Mircalla’s territory the very next day, creeping from shadow to shadow and trying fiercely not to cry.

Nadja’s existence was very lonely from that point on, occasionally brightened by visits from Edgar or the acquisition of a new human, but she embraced the solitude for the most part. She could think better without Mircalla’s chatter, and at any rate no one would imply at her monstrosity.

In many ways, the Enlightenment helped her kind out a great deal in the Old World. Science had no place for the strigoi or the vârcolac, and so the people of the world gradually forgot them, forgot why their grandfathers kept holy relics and stakes of ash wood about them. It made dining incredibly easy.

But even so, there were some graybeards who knew what to look for, and what to do with what they found.

It was the summer of 1862 when Nadja felt pain flare into violent life in her breast, white-hot and searing. It crippled her, laid her out on the floor of her fashionable sitting room, and in that moment she could feel her go, slow enough for Nadja to feel her presence blaze bright inside her, slow enough for her to feel the fear and bewilderment of her dear one, and then gone, gone, gone before Nadja could reach back into Mircalla and be there with her as she died.

Nadja learned a new shade of grief that day, surprising herself with the violence of her own pain. The idea of reconciliation had always been tucked into one of the quiet dark corners of Nadja’s mind, a seed stored in hope of a kinder season. To lose that, the possibility of returning to Mircalla and being loved again, was more than she was prepared to bear.

It led to one of her first great acts of cruelty, in time.

She left her pretty house in Paris and went back homeward, finding in Austria the fair little feast that Mircalla had doomed herself over.

Laura, the girl was called. Soft and lovely, with golden hair and innocent eyes.

Nadja hovered at the edges of Laura’s life for a month, two months, determining who came and went from the schloss, where the girl spent her worthless time and how she spent it. The humans had become complacent in the wake of Mircalla’s destruction, so certain that they had eliminated their enemy that they did not consider that another might come.

The servants died relatively quickly, and Nadja left them where they fell; they were beside the point. She found the father, the murderer of Mircalla, and he did not die quickly. Father had showed her and Edgar, when they were very small, ways of giving pain without taking life, a death of many days and nights, and this lesson she applied to the killer of her love.

His screaming brought the girl, pale and reeking of fear, and only then did Nadja stop. She left the old man gurgling on the floor, stepped over his twitching limbs and steaming insides to take the girl’s throat in her hand and squeeze.

It was easy to mesmerize Laura. The girl was weak-willed, simple, even, and had been enthralled by Mircalla once already. She stopped struggling very quickly and followed in Nadja’s wake as she left the schloss, their skirts filthy with blood and other things.

Nadja had thought that enslaving Laura would ease the rage inside her, sate the need to avenge her dear one, but she could get no satisfaction from the degradations she visited on the human. She had done her work too well; Laura submitted to everything done to her with the same look of dim adoration on her face, eyes dull and fixed ever on Nadja. Whatever Nadja did, the girl was glad to endure and rise again for more.

She had always been better at enthralling helpmeets than Mircalla.

Nadja abandoned the human in the twisting back streets of Paris in disgust, no longer able to hope for vengeance or peace or even base amusement. She retreated from the world, shut herself away in her fine house and sent out her thralls to find her meals.

It was Edgar who coaxed her out again, years later. He brought her rabbits to pet and devour, combed her neglected hair, helped her order her house again, and all the while he talked. Of new inventions, of the happenings during his travels in the New World, of a pretty woman he had seen. Nadja found herself smiling, once or twice, and she let herself lean her head against her brother’s shoulder. In him, at least, she could place her trust.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm very deeply invested in Elina Lowensohn's everything right now, and this is a byproduct of that love. I just wanted Nadja to be loved and valued...and then I destroyed it.
> 
> I may very well expand on this, because both of these characters have So Many Feelings about being undead (most of them negative) and they're both terribly lonely AND I LOVE THEM BOTH. Plus I enjoy the idea of Carmilla being something of a THIS IS SPARTA vampire and Nadja is the one holding the Kinder-Cord with a deeply unamused expression on her face.


End file.
